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(13)   Sun 3 Jan 93  8:53p
By: John Covici
To: All
Re: Leo alexander , euthanasi
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The following is being quoted from a 1949 issue of the New
England Journal of Medicine and is a statement by Leo Alexander
who participated in the 1946 Nuremberg trials.

Dr. Leo Alexander, an American physician who took part in the
1946-47 Nuremberg war crimes trials wrote in a 1949 article in
the New England Journal of Medicine on the much  debated issue of
how the Nazi crimes became possible. Whatever proportions the
crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated
them that they had started from small beginnings.

The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in
the basic attitude of physicians. It started with the acceptance
of the attitude, basic in the Euthanasia movement that there is
such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in
its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and
chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included
in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially
unproductive, the idioligically unwanted, the racially unwanted,
and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that
the infinitely small wedged-in leverfrom which this entire trend
of mind received its impetus was the attitude toard the
non-rehabilitatable sick.

 * Origin: The Lincoln Legacy  703-777-5987 1200-14400 HST

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(67)   Wed 6 Jan 93  5:58p
By: Mike Adams
To: John Covici
Re: Euthanasia
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JC> The following is being quoted from a 1949 issue of the New
    England Journal of Medicine and is a statement by Leo
    Alexander who participated in the 1946 Nuremberg trials.

Nice to see you using a reputable source for a change, John <grin>.

JC> Dr. Leo Alexander, an American physician who took part in the
    1946-47 Nuremberg war crimes trials wrote in a 1949 article
    in the New England Journal of Medicine on the much  debated
    issue of how the Nazi crimes became possible.  Whatever
    proportions the crimes finally assumed, it became evident to
    all who investigated them that they had started from small
    beginnings.

We do have a tendency to become desensitized to things in this
manner, so it's entirely believable. A little snip here, a snip
there, pretty soon you're bald, but you never noticed it was
happening because it took so long. Many have debated how the
general population could be aware of what was going on in the
camps and not recoil in horror, but the fact of the matter is
they had all been bombarded for over a decade by one of the best
propaganda machines the world has seen.

So, in that sense, it is vital that we watch what is happening in
our society. In reference to the euthanasia issue, it certainly
does bear close examination in the areas of motivation and its
eventual impact on all of us.

* Origin: Majik Shoppe Point 1 (1:19/10.1)

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(43)   Thu 7 Jan 93  7:14p
By: John Covici
To: All
Re: Euthanasia nazi crime: p1
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The following article can be freqed from 1:109/909 as
nazi_eut.zip or from any board carrying the adanet file
distribution.

From New Federalist V7, #3.

Euthanasia Is a Nazi Crime

Hitler's Euthanasia Program--More Like Today's Than You Might Imagine
by Molly Hammett Kronberg

[A longer version of this article appeared in a 1988 EIR Special
Report, ``How to Stop the Resurgence of Nazi Euthanasia Today,''
edited by Kronberg, Nancy Spannaus, and Linda Everett.]

Today we are faced with the prospect that our society will accept, and
legalize, the crime of euthanasia, for which Nazi doctors hanged at
Nuremberg.

What the Death Lobby proposes we embrace today, our country found to
be a hanging offense just 40 years ago.

Forty years ago, at the postwar trials in Nuremberg of Nazi war
criminals, Americans had no doubt that euthanasia (``mercy killing'')
was a brutal crime committed against the most defenseless members of
society: the ill, retarded, infants, elderly. Nazi doctors were tried
and hanged for committing euthanasia. But now, the Death Lobby hopes
to change our morality into that of Adolf Hitler.

Today's euthanasia-promoters insist that what they propose, and
practice, is ``different from the Nazis.'' The Nazi euthanasia
program, they say, was racist. To carry out euthanasia on racial
principles is terrible, today's Death Lobby says; but, apparently, if
you're not a racist, euthanasia is fine. In other words: Euthanasia
without regard to race, creed, or color.

The Death Lobby is most anxious to promote the lie that it differs
greatly from the Nazis. Thus, the issue of ``Nazi euthanasia versus
`nice' euthanasia,'' was the topic of a seminar held as long ago as
1976 at the Hastings Institute, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

At that seminar spoke Telford Taylor, who prides himself on being an
historian of Nazi Germany. Taylor's principal credential in this
regard is that he was Chief Counsel for the Prosecution at Nuremberg,
when the Tribunals were convened in 1945 to try the major Nazi war
criminals.

At Hastings Taylor declared, from his supposedly great knowledge of
Nazi Germany, that there is no correspondence between today's Death
Lobby, which wishes to use euthanasia as a ``deliverance'' for the
terribly ill, and the Nazis, who, he asserted, used euthanasia as a
racial policy.

Taylor was not telling the truth.  His lies have been more than useful
to the Death Lobby. Just this year [1988--ed.] Daniel Callahan, the
director of Hastings, wrote:

``On the whole, I think it fair to say that most of the symposium
participants (including Telford Taylor...) came to think that there
are few parallels between what the Nazis did and more recent
discussions and practices. Lucy Dawidowicz, a major historian of the
Holocaust, made a persuasive case that the Nazi atrocities sprang from
an outright racist theory and that words such as `mercy killing' were
nothing other than cover phrases for those theories.  We should not
confuse our explorations of euthanasia, for example, with what
happened then.''

Callahan is lying too. Adolf Hitler's euthanasia program was not much
different from what the Death Lobby wants today.

Today's Propaganda for Death

To understand that, it is useful to begin by identifying the main
characteristics of the Euthanasia Movement we fight against today.

Look at the propaganda with which the Euthanasia Movement tries to
justify its crimes. Its leaders say they seek ``death with dignity,''
a calm, peaceful, ``good death'' (for that is what euthanasia means,
in Greek), for the desperately ill.

How do they package their lies?

1. Broadly, today's Death Lobby is replacing the fundamental tenet of
Judeo-Christian civilization--namely, that human life is sacred, that
each human being is made in the image of God--with the notion of
``quality of life.'' ``Quality of life'' is a code-phrase which means
that when you, your doctor, or your grandchildren--or, if you are a
retarded newborn, your parents--decide that your ``quality of life''
is not up to par, you become a murder victim.

Are you old? Sick? Disabled? Then your ``quality of life'' is
inadequate, by Death Lobby standards. That becomes the criterion for
killing you. The Death Lobby is undermining the basis for all our
morality: that life is, in itself, to be cherished; that with God
alone rests the decision on the moment of your death.

2. A second criterion the Death Lobby uses to justify euthanasia,
related to the ``quality of life'' definition, is that of cost.  If it
is costing society ``too much'' to keep you alive--and here too, ``too
much'' is a human determination, made by your doctor, family,
insurance company, or Medicare--then you must die. Is it fair to
society, the Death Lobby screeches, to keep alive those whose lives
lack ``quality,'' when it costs money to do so? This accountant's
determination is another criterion for killing you off.

3. The Death Lobby advances a third vicious argument: How can people
be made to suffer ``invasive technology,'' like feeding tubes or
respirators, to keep them alive?  Obviously (according to the Death
Lobby), such people would prefer to die, than to suffer in order to
live.  If the patients cannot say so, or do not say so, ``society''
must make the decision. ``Let us spare them the pain of being
medically cared for.''

In the past decade, the United States has also seen cases in which a
patient said explicitly he did {not} want to die. The Death Lobby
circumvents that awkward will to live by classifying such people as
``incompetent,'' ``mentally disturbed.'' Obviously, the Death Lobby
says, they ``don't know what they really want.'' And so the plug gets
pulled anyhow.

All these arguments are made to masquerade as humanitarian concerns,
for the patient, his family, his society, or future generations.

The Death Lobby argues, therefore, that its campaign is a noble
endeavor, and entirely to be distinguished from Hitler's murderous
program.

The Death Lobby of Yesterday

The most famous predecessors of today's Death Lobby made the same
arguments, on ``quality of life'' and cost-accounting. Take examples
from one prominent leader of the early euthanasia movement:

Euthanasia must be ``kept very narrow in scope, and cover only the
most serious cases.'' For example, in cases of ``severely mentally ill
or ill persons, to be eliminated by actions that bring about death....
As examples ... cases in which the ill could only be bedded on sand or
sawdust because they continually befouled themselves.... (Mental)
patients putting their own excrement into their mouths.''

Or, ``Those cases ... we know as burnt-out ruins.''

No difference here--the Death Lobby would find this perfectly
acceptable, a merciful view expressing revulsion at human suffering,
plus a shrewd understanding of cost-cutting.  Hemlock Society founder
Derek Humphry and the rest would endorse these statements heartily.
And, if they knew the personal experiences that underlay the
statements, they would say triumphantly, ``See? the experience of
human suffering leads one to those conclusions.''

Indeed, the early euthanasia ideologue quoted above, had formed his
conclusions from just such an experience of human suffering, in a way
today's Death Lobby proponents would approve. He had undergone a
terrible loss--his mother's death from cancer--when he was 18 years
old.

His widowed mother at 47 was diagnosed as having breast cancer. A
mastectomy made little difference; the cancer had spread. Her
18-year-old son was summoned home to care for her.

This he did, cooking all the meals, caring for his younger sister,
keeping house, sitting by his mother's bedside when she was wracked
with pain.

He consulted her doctor; the only thing that seemed to offer hope was
a radical, terribly expensive treatment, a highly toxic drug called
iodoform.

The boy gave his consent to this radical, costly treatment, and spent
the family's whole life savings on it. Every day, as instructed by the
doctor, he applied iodoform-soaked bandages to his mother's
post-operative wounds, as she screamed in pain. Just before Christmas
she died in his arms.

On Christmas Eve the son visited the doctor, to pay the final bill
which wiped out the family savings.

Think how many elderly people today have signed ``living wills,''
convinced that by so doing they are sparing their families suffering
and financial ruin, of just the type brought on this family by the
son's devotion to keeping his mother alive.

In any case, this shattering experience lies behind the quotes you
read above--the quotes today's Death Lobby would endorse. Specifics
of the story are briefly told: The year was 1907, the town was Linz,
in Austria. The dying woman was Klara Hitler, and her 18-year-old son
was Adolf.

Adolf Hitler's obsession with euthanasia began precisely at that
point. Not so different from Derek Humphry, who says the experience of
his cancer-stricken wife is what led him to make killing his life's
work.

All right, a proponent of today's Death Lobby might concede, but
still, the Nazi euthanasia program was racist, directed against
``subhumans,'' Jews, Gypsies, Slavs. The approach today, the Death
Lobby would argue, is informed by compassion, not genocidal mania.

In fact, as we shall show, Hitler's euthanasia program was, explicitly
and by his order, not directed against ``subhumans.'' Jews were not
allowed to ``participate'' in euthanasia, for Hitler considered
euthanasia a privilege and a deliverance, not a punishment for the
millions of people he hated and meant to murder otherwise.

In other words, the Death Lobby is lying. Hitler's euthanasia program
was not designed to kill off ``subhumans''; it was designed, like the
Euthanasia Movement today, to kill in the name of ``mercy,'' those
whose ``quality of life'' failed the test.  Where today's Death Lobby
speaks of ``quality of life,'' Hitler made up his own phrase:  ``lives
not worthy to be lived.'' Not so different from today's Death Lobby.

This is not to say that there is not an intrinsic connection between
Hitler's euthanasia program, and the genocidal murder of millions
carried out at his order. Exploring that connection will show that,
from the ``small beginnings'' of the euthanasia program, arose the
Final Solution which killed 6 million European Jews; thence too, the
mass murder of Slavs and Gypsies.

Similarly today, murder on a vast scale is intimately related to the
crimes the Death Lobby would commit. The same society which today
prepares to legitimize euthanasia, has already written off millions of
people. Africa is dying of famine and AIDS, but this mass dying is
considered acceptable by institutions like the International Monetary
Fund, or the Death Lobby itself. After all, Africans' ``quality of
life'' is inadequate. Why spend money to save these people, the
genocidalists think--particularly since they're black?

`Small Beginnings'

We cited above the ``small beginnings'' of Hitler's euthanasia
program, and suggested that, in turn, his euthanasia policy
represented the ``small beginnings'' of the Holocaust.

This conception of ``small beginnings'' was never better expressed
than at the Nuremberg Trials by Dr. Leo Alexander. A witness for the
prosecution against the Nazi doctors, Dr. Alexander (a Jewish
psychiatrist from Vienna who had emigrated to America), formulated the
core theory of the trials, on just this point:

``Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed,'' Alexander
wrote, ``It became evident to all who investigated them that they had
started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a
subtle shift in emphasis in basic attitude, basic in the euthanasia
movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.
This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the
severely and chronically sick.  Gradually the sphere of those to be
included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially
unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and
finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the
infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind
received its impetus was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitatable
sick.

``It is, therefore, this subtle shift in emphasis of the physicians'
attitude that one must thoroughly investigate. It is a recent trend in
medicine, including psychiatry, to regard prevention as more important
than cure.''

We have referred to the fact that Nazi doctors were hanged at
Nuremberg, for committing euthanasia. It is worth examining the
trials, to recapture the understanding Americans had 40 years ago, of
why euthanasia is a crime.

It was Americans alone who brought the Nazi doctors to trial--as
opposed to the major Nazi war criminals, who were tried by a joint
tribunal of Americans, British, French, and Russians. The U.S.
military constituted special tribunals to try the doctors for
euthanasia, and made it clear that these particular men were on trial,
not for having murdered Jews or Poles--they had not; others had--but
for having murdered Germans. The tribunal made clear that no challenge
might be made to the United States' right to try representatives of
the collapsed German government for crimes committed against German
citizens, for the crime of euthanasia was so abhorrent to the
civilized world, that the U.S.A. had to prosecute it. Furthermore, the
murdered Germans had no one to speak for them, since they had been
murdered at the hands of their own government.

The U.S. Military Tribunal wrote, in applying the definition of a
crime against humanity to cover German victims, not just conquered
civilians:

``The words `civilian population' cannot possibly be construed to
exclude German civilians. If Germans are deemed to be excluded [from
the class of victims], there is little or nothing left to give purpose
to the concept of crimes against humanity.... It is one of the very
purposes of the concept of crimes against humanity ... to reach the
systematic commission of atrocities and offenses by a state against
its own people.''

The comparison today would be the Americans murdered by court order in
this country: Paul Brophy of Massachusetts, starved by court order in
1986 because he had suffered a stroke; Nancy Ellen Jobes, starved in
New Jersey in 1987 by court order, because she was brain-damaged; Baby
Doe, starved in 1982 in Indiana because he was born with Down's
Syndrome.

The lead defendant at the Nazi doctors' trial was Dr. Karl Brandt,
Hitler's physician and friend, and the man to whom Hitler had
entrusted his euthanasia program.

Here is what Brandt said proudly, in July 1947, shortly before he was
hanged: ``I have always fought in good conscience for my personal
convictions and done so uprightly, frankly, and openly.''

He meant his practice of euthanasia. Brandt continued: ``...|I am
fully conscious that when I said `yes' to euthanasia, I did so with
the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was
right.  Death can mean deliverance. Death is life--just as much as
birth. It was never meant to be murder. I bear a burden, but it is not
the burden of crime. I bear this burden of mine, though with a heavy
heart, as my responsibility. I stand before it, and before my
conscience, as a man and as a doctor.''

So said Hitler's friend. This is no different from what today's killer
doctors say. No doubt Brandt believed it as much, or as little, as
they.  Indeed, Brandt's judges wrote,

``We have no doubt that Karl Brandt--as he himself testified--is a
sincere believer in the administration of euthanasia to persons
hopelessly ill, whose lives are burdensome to themselves and an
expense to the state or their families....''

The principal difference between Brandt and today's Dr. Deaths, is
that Brandt was hanged for what he did--not for genocide (others were
hanged for that), but for euthanasia pure and simple. In contrast,
today's killer doctors are popular talk-show guests.

The Nazi `Biomedical Vision'

In order to understand the Nazi euthanasia crimes, it is necessary to
understand one thing more, the connection between euthanasia and
genocide. That connection holds today, just as it did in Hitler's
time.

In a book published in 1986 under the title {The Nazi Doctors,} Robert
Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at John Jay
College in New York, expressed the connection well, by referring to
what he called the ``Nazi biomedical vision.'' Years before he came to
power, Hitler had expanded his view that euthanasia was good, and
death a goal to strive for, to include the idea that whole races of
man represented disease.

In doing this, Hitler started from the experience of his mother's
death, and the ``revelation'' he said came to him as a soldier in
World War I: that the life of the individual exists to be sacrificed
to the life of the nation or ``race'' (the {Volk}). If the individual
could be sacrificed (or, in ``racial hygiene'' terms, culled) for the
good of all, could not whole races and peoples be sacrificed with
equal equanimity, for the supposed good of mankind? Here, Hitler
applied his personal experience of death and dying, to society
overall, and made of his personal medical concepts, social ones.

Therefore, just as his Third Reich would be purified by ``delivering''
the terribly ill from their suffering, so too, the world would be
purged of the peoples whom Hitler called a cancer destroying mankind.
First and foremost, the Jews.

The underlying principle of Nazi medicine was this: Illness is ``a
disgrace to be managed by health control,'' and ``misery can only be
removed from the world by painless extermination of the miserable!''
Put differently, if you find human suffering unbearable, kill the
sufferers. (Both quotes are 1922 pronouncements of Ernst Mann, a
German ``medical ethicist'' and writer.)

In fact, long before Hitler's birth, just such ``medical
ethicists''--the antecedents of today's ``medical ethicists,'' who
roam the land arguing for euthanasia--had prepared the way for
Hitler's outlook.  Among them: Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton
and the nineteenth-century French racist Count de Gobineau.  Or the
1895 book {Das Recht auf den Tod}--{The Right to Death,} by medical
theorist Adolf Jost. Jost's ultimate, biological argument: ``The
rights to death (are) the key to the fitness of life. The state must
own death--must kill--in order to keep the social organism alive and
healthy.''

Hitler's own ``biomedical vision'' of the Jews can be deduced from his
declarations in {Mein Kampf,} the first volume of which he wrote in
1924, nine years before he came to power. There he set down his theory
of ``isolating'' the peoples he considered not people at all, really,
but germs:

``[Society must] If necessary ...  proceed to the pitiless isolation
of incurably diseased people; a barbaric measure for one who was
unfortunate enough to be stricken with it, but a blessing for his
contemporaries and for posterity.''

He characterized the Jews repeatedly, obsessively, in phrases derived
from the realm of biology and parasitology. {Mein Kampf} portrays the
Jews variously as:

Maggots in a rotting corpse; a plague worse than the Black Death; germ
carriers; mankind's eternal germ of disunion; the drones in the human
hive; spiders sucking blood from the people's pores; a pack of rats
eating one another; parasites in the bodies of other peoples; a
spreading bacillus; the eternal bloodsucker; the parasite of peoples;
the vampire of peoples.

Where people become mere physical objects, bodies--without
souls--morality is doomed. With his insane visions of disease and
``cure,'' Hitler defined human beings as things, just as the Death
Lobby does today, when it insists that we must end the lives of people
who are ``really only vegetables.''

If one evolves a worldview in which certain classes of human
beings--the terribly deformed, the terminally ill, the retarded--are
no longer considered persons, then the decision to kill them is not
considered murder, either. The justification the Death Lobby uses
today for euthanasia, is no different from the one Hitler used to try
to exterminate the Jews: He denied them their personhood. As early as
1923 he wrote: ``Yes, the Jew is a race.  But not a human race; an
alien race. The Jew is not made in God's image. The Jew is not
human.''

Believing that, Hitler could believe with equal fervor that the Final
Solution was not murder, but medical hygiene.

If diseased ``folk-comrades'' among the Germans should be granted
euthanasia as a release from their unnatural, wretched condition, then
a people which was not diseased, but {was} a disease, should be
eradicated.  That was the reasoning of {Mein Kampf.} Hitler
approvingly cited the example of German psychiatrist and ``medical
ethicist'' Otto Weininger, who killed himself when he ``realized'' he
was fatally diseased--he was Jewish.

In a second book, written in 1928 but never published (it was found in
his desk at the end of the war and published in the 1960s), Hitler
developed his theories further:

``...In truth that struggle for daily bread, both in peace and in
war, is an eternal battle against thousands upon thousands of
obstacles, just as life itself is an eternal struggle against death.
For men know as little why they live, as does any other creature of
the world. Only life is filled with the longing to preserve itself....
[To this correspond] the two powerful life-instincts, hunger and love.

``Countless are the species of all the Earth's organisms, unlimited at
any moment in all individuals is their instinct for self-preservation
as well as their longing for continuance....  {Therefore, he who wants
to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world of
eternal struggle, does not deserve to be alive''} (emphasis added).

From this psychotic syllogism, Hitler drew the following conclusion:
Those who are too ill to ``fight,'' have no claim at all on Nature's
bloody bounty. By being ill, they have demonstrated their unfitness to
live, and it is only ``merciful'' to end their misery. So Hitler
wrote: ``If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer
present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends.''

And, in the course of developing his demonic worldview, Hitler
formulated his fundamental ``biomedical'' conception, which covered
sterilization of the ``unfit''; euthanasia; and, ultimately, genocide.
That was the notion Hitler personally expressed with the words ``life
not worthy to be lived,'' or ``life unworthy of life.'' This phrase,
which became the slogan of Nazi biomedical murder, is infamous today;
equally infamous should be the phrase ``quality of life,'' for the two
mean the same.

The Nazi Euthanasia Program

Now, let us look at the evolution of the Nazi euthanasia program, from
Hitler's accession to power on January 30, 1933. Five months later, on
June 22, Hitler decreed the regime's first sterilization law, to guard
against {Volkstod} (folk-death, or of the race). Its enforcement,
begun immediately, included the sterilization of 200,000 mentally
deficient; 80,000 schizophrenics; 20,000 manic depressives; 60,000
epileptics; 600 victims of Huntington's chorea; 4,000 hereditarily
blind; 16,000 hereditarily deaf; 20,000 with grave malformation;
10,000 alcoholics.

The next major phase of implementing Hitler's ``biomedical vision''
was the promulgation, on September 15, 1935, during the annual Nazi
Party Rally at Nuremberg, of the so-called Nuremberg Racial Laws,
forbidding marriage or sexual relations between Jew and non-Jew. On
October 18, 1935, came down an order regulating and extending the
practice of sterilization. This law permitted for the first time
sterilization by irradiation for the purpose of ``scientific
experiment.''

The step from sterilization of the unwanted to euthanasia against them
was a small, almost imperceptible one, and a project Hitler had long
cherished.  Indeed, during that same 1935 Nuremberg rally, Hitler
first mentioned to Dr.  Gerhard Wagner, the chief physician of the
Reich (comparable to our surgeon general), his intention to eliminate
the ``incurably ill.'' When Karl Brandt was tried at Nuremberg, he
testified that in that discussion, Hitler had explicitly linked the
killing off of the ``incurably ill,'' to war.  The reasons Hitler gave
were three: The upheavals of war would mute religious opposition; a
war effort requires a healthy people; and the diminished sense of the
value of human life in wartime made war ``the best time for the
elimination of the incurably ill.''

But that does not mean Hitler did not consider his euthanasia order,
when he issued it, a blessing for those whom it would kill.  He made
it clear he did, as we shall see.

Not until the outbreak of the Second World War, however, did Hitler
inaugurate the euthanasia program formally. In fact, his famous
general euthanasia order to Brandt and his immediate associates
(quoted below), although issued in October 1939, was backdated to
September 1, 1939--the day of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Thus, some
argue, even Hitler did not contemplate such a far-reaching law until
he could ``justify'' it to himself as a war measure. One might well
wonder whether Hitler had any such scruples; in any case, today's
Death Lobby has not.

Before the war, of course, the Nazi ``mercy killing'' had begun; but
until October 1939, each case of ``mercy killing'' had to be decided
on individually by the Fuehrer, who used the office of Hans Lammers,
the secretary of his Reichschancellery, to run his own personal
euthanasia program. The victims were children, newborns and infants,
the most helpless members of society. Many of these damaged or
critically ill infants and children were killed by overdose of
sedatives, which often took three or four days to accomplish their
task.  Luminal was used, or sometimes morphine-scopalamine. Sometimes
they were starved--``humanely,'' the way it's sometimes done in U.S.
hospitals today, with doses of painkillers.

The fate of these children was decided case-by-case by Hitler, in
response to letters from parents or doctors who sought his approval to
``grant'' a euthanasia death to retarded or disabled chidren.

The first such request to the Fuehrer to grant a ``mercy death'' to a
child, came in 1938, and involved a couple named Knauer, who wrote
Hitler to ask his permission to kill their infant, who was born blind,
with a leg and part of an arm missing, and ``seems to be an idiot.''
Hitler sent his doctor, Karl Brandt, to visit the clinic at the
University of Leipzig where the child was hospitalized, to consult the
doctors and examine the child. Then Hitler gave his permission.
often took three or four days to accomplish their

In 1973, the father of the Knauer child described how Hitler had sent
Brandt to him, to discuss the euthanasia of the child: ``He explained
to me that the Fuehrer had personally sent him, and that my son's case
interested the Fuehrer.... The Fuehrer wanted to (solve) the problem
of people who had no future--whose lives were worthless.... From then
on, we wouldn't have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because
the Fuehrer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we
could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich
could be proud... That's what Herr Brandt explained to me.... He was
like a savior to us--the man who could deliver us from a heavy
burden.''

After the Knauer child's case, Hitler ordered the Reichschancellery
Secretariat and Brandt to investigate each case as it was brought to
his attention, and make recommendations.

The lives of such unfortunates, Hitler told his intimates, ``are not
worth living.'' And they deserve ``mercy--in their case, death.''

Infanticide with `Safeguards'

But--something today's Death Lobby will not be happy to hear--even in
Hitler's Germany, there were the kinds of ``safeguards'' the Death
Lobby boasts of today. For an infant or child to be killed, the
attending physician and a district medical officer first had to make a
report. Then three more medical experts were brought in to review the
case; a unanimous decision among the three was required for euthanasia
to be performed. When the three medical experts all voted to kill the
child, additional medical information from the local medical officer
was required. The children were then put under ``observation,'' to
confirm that the decision was the correct one.

But, as would be the case with today's Death Lobby, the decisions
were, in the overwhelming number of cases, for death.

Apparently, the murder of infants was a relatively easy step for the
Nazi doctors to take--just as, today, members of the President's
Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and
Biomedical and Behavioral Research can calmly recommend the
euthanasia-murder of newborns.

Think we're exaggerating? Take the following example. On January 9,
1982, Mary Anne Warren, then a philosophy professor at San Francisco
State University, told the President's Bioethics Commission just that.
About the same time, in an article in {Ethical Issues in Modern
Medicine,} Warren wrote:

``A fetus, even a fully developed one''--she means a newborn
baby--``is considerably less like a person than is the average mature
mammal, indeed the average fish. And I think that a rational person
must conclude that if the right to life of a fetus is to be based upon
its resemblance to a person, then it cannot be said to have any more
right to life than, let us say, a newborn guppy (which also seems to
be capable of feeling pain.)

``...It follows from my argument that when an unwanted or defective
infant is born into a society which cannot afford and/or is not
willing to care for it, then its destruction is permissible.''

When, this newspaper's predecessor in February 1982 exposed Warren in
print, she responded, ``Not all the Nazis did was bad.''


The conclusion? Today's Euthanasia Movement too has a ``biomedical
vision.'' Today that vision covers the abortion lobby, infanticide,
euthanasia, ``assisted suicide,'' organ-farming, and genocide against
the Third World.

In Nazi Germany, as now, it was a small step from infanticide to
euthanasia against adults. That extension of the killing to adults
occurred with Hitler's order of October 1939. That summer, Hitler had
called in the secretary for health in the interior ministry, plus
Reichschancellery Secretary Lammers, to tell them that ``he considered
it to be proper that the `life unworthy of life' of severely mentally
ill persons be eliminated by actions that bring about death.'' In this
way, ``a certain saving in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel
could be brought about.''

Thus, as Germany hurtled toward war, Hitler was planning to formalize
his euthanasia program, and extend it to as many ``defectives'' as
possible.  The reasons he gave were these: to save money, medicine,
and personnel for the war effort. But that was not all.  Hitler
clearly enunciated one more reason: Because, he told his intimates, he
considered these euthanasia-killings ``humane.'' Does it make you
shudder, that Adolf Hitler told his associates he was doing this (in
his own words) for ``reasons of humanity''?

That's what the Death Lobby says today. But Judeo-Christian
civilization has always recognized that certain acts are absolutely
crimes, or sins, no matter what the perpetrator thinks or claims to
think. Murder is such a sin.  If we as a civilization are still agreed
that Adolf Hitler was a monster, cannot we as a civilization agree
that today's Death Lobby is, as well?

Examine Hitler's reasons for his order: cost-cutting, saving on
medical personnel, ``humanitarian'' concerns.  Today's Death Lobby
says the same.

In any case, here is the text of Hitler's top-secret euthanasia decree
of October 1939--which he wrote by hand in one copy only, and gave to
Karl Brandt. It said simply: ``Reichsleiter (Philip) Bouhler and Dr.
(Karl) Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the
authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that
patients considered incurable according to the best available human
judgment of their state of health, can be accorded a mercy death
[{Gnadentod}].``--Signed: Adolf Hitler'' As a title to the order,
Hitler wrote ``Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens''--``The Destruction
of Lives Unworthy of Life.''

There is nothing in there, except the signature, that today's Death
Lobby would quarrel with.

On the strength of that order, 100,000 Germans were put to death over
the next two years. In detail, these included 70-80,000 patients in
medical and nursing institutions; 10-20,000 invalids and disabled
people in prisons; 3,000 children between the ages of 3 and 13 who
were in special schools or needed special care.

But, before the order was implemented, any Jews who might have
``benefited'' from this ``mercy''-killing were gotten out of the way.
All the Jews in German psychiatric hospitals were deported to
concentration camps, so as to deny them the {Gnadentod} of euthanasia.

Hitler's conviction that this was a mercy went further. He demanded
that the euthanasia deaths be utterly painless--as opposed to the
horror of the concentration camps. Not only did he insist that the
most painless methods be used, and that he personally approve the
methods. He also insisted that only doctors perform the euthanasia.
When Karl Brandt was summoned to explain the methods of
killing--lethal injection of morphine, as contrasted with carbon
monoxide poisoning--Hitler's only question was, ``Which is the more
humane way?''

Not much different from the outlook of ``medical ethicists'' today.

A Strange Kind of Mercy

The conclusion is obvious: In Hitler's eyes, euthanasia was a
privilege, not a punishment. He thought the way the Death Lobby does
today.  There is another, compelling argument to satisfy yourself of
this. The Final Solution--which claimed the lives of 6 million
European Jews--and the systematic murders of 3 million non-Jewish
Poles and 500,000 Gypsies, were carried out without a single written
order, or even the record of a spoken order, from Hitler. There is no
question whatever that Hitler ordered the Holocaust; SS chieftain
Heinrich Himmler would never have dared undertake such a program
without direct orders from Hitler. But there exists no record of those
orders.

In all the transcripts of his military conferences, or table
conversation, in everything reported of him by his inner circle,
Hitler never mentioned the Final Solution. Clearly, this was by
intention. Clearly, he perfectly well understood the enormity of what
he had ordered.

However, the case is very different with euthanasia. That Hitler wrote
that order in his own hand, and signed it, that he discussed it with
numerous subordinates, including many who were government
functionaries, not top Nazi paladins, makes it very clear that he did
not consider euthanasia a crime. He was willing to put his name to it;
he called it humanitarianism. In contrast, he considered the Final
Solution the deepest, darkest secret of his regime, of his life--one
which he would not discuss even with his closest associates, except
Himmler.

If someone from the Death Lobby today insists that he is absolutely
different from Hitler, because the Death Lobby proposes euthanasia
only to be ``merciful,'' remember the facts recorded here. The
civilized world disagreed with Hitler's definition of ``mercy.'' What
about the definition today's Death Lobby puts forth?

In August 1941, two years after it had begun, Hitler ordered the
suspension of his euthanasia program per se. There were three reasons.
First, outcry from German churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike.
Second, and from Hitler's standpoint more compelling--on June 22,
1941, he had invaded the Soviet Union. That meant that he now had at
his command huge Eastern spaces in which to operate the project he
considered his life's work:  the extermination of all European Jews,
and many, many Slavs.

The third reason for ending the program was related to the second: The
apparatus created for the euthanasia program (codenamed T4, for
Tiergarten 4, the address of Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin) was now
needed for this vast new plan, the murder of a whole people.

With the suspension of the euthanasia program, T4 personnel were lent
to Himmler, to rid the concentration camps of ``excess'' prisoners,
those diagnosed as ``mentally unfit,'' ``physically unfit,'' or
``incurably ill.''

This was the genesis of ``Operation (or Special Treatment) 14f13,'' a
program most fully developed at Auschwitz, and personified by Dr.
Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death. Thus, ``euthanasia,'' death
as the ultimate ``cure'' for disease, was extended to whole classes of
people.  But at Auschwitz, still, the program was carried out by
white-coated SS doctors; part of the ``Nazi biomedical vision,'' as
Lifton writes.

Jews as a group were categorized as instrinsically ``unfit,''
psychopaths or sociopaths; that alone became the medical basis for
their selection for ``Special Treatment.'' Being a Jew was considered
by the Nazi doctors in white, to be an illness, for which the only
humane cure was death.  Were the Nazi doctors mad? Yes. Is today's
Death Lobby morally insane?  Again, yes.

Since the SS doctors had embraced the psychosis that they were
``curing'' terrible, terminal diseases, like ``racial inferiority,''
they insisted on conducting their selection and processing with all
medical accoutrements. White coats; alcohol swabs to clean a
prisoner's arm before a fatal injection of phenol was given; medical
charts hanging at the foot of the bed a doomed ma man would occupy for
a few minutes during the killing. If a prisoner were ill, it was by no
means uncommon for him to be treated, possibly cured--and then killed.

The schizophrenic ``ethic'' of the Nazi death camps is attested by one
Auschwitz survivor, quoted by Lifton in his book, who said of Mengele:

``|`He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them
become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in
their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire.... And
then, next to that, the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow
or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where
the anomaly lay.'|''

Another Auschwitz survivor, cited, like the one above, in Lifton's
{Nazi Doctors} book, tried to explain the ``anomaly.'' The only way
she could, was to tell Lifton, when he interviewed her, ``|`It was
like a dog pound.'|'' Workers in a pound take care of the animals,
feed them, give them water and medicine, ``|`sometimes even play with
them, or make them pets,'|'' she said--all the while knowing they will
kill the dogs and cats.

She described Mengele demanding that the prisoners' cages be cleaned,
or increasing their rations and medicine, only to send them to the
slaughterhouse a few days later. It was in this way, she thought, that
Mengele and the Nazi doctors preserved their schizophrenic notion of
themselves as ``humane.'' That they did--that the Nazi doctors Lifton
interviewed for his book considered they had upheld the Hippocratic
Oath--cannot be doubted.  They had gone morally mad.

Side by side with this furthest extreme of the ``Nazi biomedical
vision,'' millions were being processed through the double lines at
Auschwitz--those sent to the right, to be worked to death. Those sent
to the left, to be gassed and burnt.

Mengele and the other SS doctors presided over this selection process.

Any reader will ask himself: Is it possible that {anyone,} even these
SS doctors, could have believed that the mass killings and depraved
``experiments'' on which Mengele and his colleagues worked, were
humane?

Well, can the Death Lobby today believe that starving a stroke victim
to death is humane?

What About Today?

We have stressed the point: In our own time, in our own country,
doctors and ethicists preach ``merciful death'' and, with court
approval, practice this crime. A favorite method is starvation; the
euphemism is ``withdrawal of treatment,'' where food and water are
reckoned as treatment. In the Nazi period, the euphemism was only
slightly different: ``special treatment.''

Nor is it only a small number of Death Lobby fanatics who believe
euthanasia is ethical. It is the liberal media, the courts--including,
apparently, the Supreme Court, which in 1986 ruled that the government
has no right to intervene to stop the starvation of infants born with
Down's Syndrome, if the parents request it--and the courts in
Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, which have ruled for euthanasia
since 1979.

These same white-coated doctors, priests and ministers, theologians,
sit at ethics seminars in our universities and thinktanks today, and
debate how a great nation like Germany could have been taken over by
Nazism. How, they ask, could a monster like Hitler have been created?
Yet they confidently expect the public to credit them with high
humanitarian goals, for imposing on our society the sin of euthanasia.

No doubt Derek Humphry was distraught, when someone he loved lay dying
of cancer. Adolf Hitler was, too.  The conclusions Hitler drew from
that experience, we call mass murder. The conclusions our society is
drawing are not so different. Like Hitler's, they derive, as Leo
Alexander warned, from ``small beginnings.'' But they have vast
consequences. Isn't it time we said of today's Death Lobby and its
bloodlust, what we once said of Hitler?

JOHN COVICI

* Origin: The Lincoln Legacy  703-777-5987 1200-14400 HST

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(137)   Tue 19 Jan 93  8:48p
By: Mike Adams
To: Marianne Spengler
Re: Views Of Death
----------------------------------------------------------------------
MS> Such suffering is senseless.  That we allow it to take place
    is a manifestation of our own childish fears about death, not
    a reasoned response to dying.  But the laws about
    death-assisted deaths will change, mainly because of people
    like Jack Kevorkian.  I liken him to Margaret Sanger, the
    woman who changed our attitudes towards birth control.

Marianne, your description of the situations your relatives went
through was quite moving. I know from similar experiences that
many times people will reach a point at which they cannot view
continuing as a viable alternative to death. I do think it's
dangerous to say that fearing death is childish, however.

I've been doing some research into the history of the euthenasia
movement, spurred on in part by some of the accounts that were
recently posted here in regard to its presence in Germany during
the 30's and WW II years. In nearly every instance, the movement
seems to start with high-minded goals. After all, why should
people be "forced" to live when it's so evident they cannot live
productive lives. Why not allow them to pass on? Why should
people be forced to endure pain? Isn't there a threshhold of
pain and agony that people should not be required to undergo?

The answers to those questions are not easy ones.

Then the movement starts deciding that those who cannot care for
themselves or who cannot live productive lives really would not
choose to continue living if they were truely capable of
understanding their plight. If they saw it, they'd surely decide
it was right and proper to cease living. Right?

This is the part of the movement that's most frightening. It's
the part that should be "killed" before it breathes life anew.

* Origin: Majik Shoppe Point 1 (1:19/10.1)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(152)   Thu 21 Jan 93  9:31a
By: Rob Flor
To: Mike Adams
Re: Views Of Death
----------------------------------------------------------------------
MS> Such suffering is senseless. That we allow it to take place
    is a manifestation of our own childish fears about death, not
    a reasoned response to dying.  But the laws about
    death-assisted deaths will change, mainly because of people
    like Jack Kevorkian.  I liken him to Margaret Sanger, the
    woman who changed our attitudes towards birth control.

MA> Marianne, your description of the situations your relatives went
    through was quite moving.  I know from similar experiences
    that many times people will reach a point at which they
    cannot view continuing as a viable alternative to death. I do
    think it's dangerous to say that fearing death is childish,
    however.

MA> I've been doing some research into the history of the euthenasia
    movement, spurred on in part by some of the accounts that
    were recently posted here in regard to its presence in
    Germany during the 30's and WW II years.

People were allowed to chose the time of their dying for
thousands of years before the Nazi movement.  In fact, it was
only after it became a thing to be regulated that the Nazi
movement was born.

MA> In nearly every instance, the movement seems to start with
    high-minded goals.

Please be more specific because many of us, well, me anyway,
aren't familiar with the history of euthenasia movements you are
studying.

You know, like "The American 1920's euthenasia movement and the
1890 Dutch Stamp out Suffering movement were two instances which
seemed to start out with high minded goals but then started
deciding that those who cannot care for themselves . . . "

MA> Then the movement starts deciding that those who cannot care for
    themselves who cannot live productive lives really would not
    choose to continue living they were truly capable of
    understanding their plight.  If they saw it, the surely
    decide it was right and proper to cease living.  Right?

People like to meddle and thats a fact.  :)

Rob

* Real men don't need leg-irons.

* Origin: The Purple Rose of Cairo, Pok NY  US
[phone](1:272/58)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(174)   Tue 26 Jan 93  9:05p
By: John Covici
To: All
Re: Cmpgn to destroy med. p1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Kevorkian's `medicide' is a
campaign to destroy medicine
by Linda Everett

After the killing of eight women in Michigan over the last two
and half years by a man who admits he has been ``concerned about
death for the last 34 years,'' the serial killer is still on the
loose. The killing spree began in June 1990 when Michigan
authorities found Jack Kevorkian, 63, an out-of-work pathologist
with blood on his pants, standing outside his rusty van in a
parking lot. A dead woman, whom the perpetrator called his first
``research project,'' lay on a cot in the back of the van, with
multiple bruises on her arm where the pathologist had jabbed at
her veins to introduce the lethal intravenous drip.

Thirty months after that first ``research project'' died; after
the pathologist's mail-order plans for ``suicide machines'' have
been used to kill in California; after his ``assisted-suicide''
rationale spurred several ``copy-cat'' murders; after he had a
Pennsylvania woman transported across state lines into Michigan
for his on-the-spot counseling/killing services, we are told that
Jack Kevorkian is ``itching'' to kill again. According to his
showman attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, Jack is ``itching to get
across state lines'' to treat ``potential clients'' in Ohio,
where his brand of murder is supposedly not illegal.

How is it that an individual who publicly affirms that no law can
stop him from taking more lives, is still allowed to hang out his
shingle--Penumbra, Inc.--to prey upon, film, ``counsel,'' and
then kill, vulnerable and often mentally disabled women? How is
it that the public lionizes this man as a ``compassionate''
doctor, yet he has never treated a live patient, and he attacks
Judeo-Christian medical ethics as ``equally culpable'' of the
crimes of torture as Nazi doctors--when it is that same
Judeo-Christian basis in modern medical science that produced the
breakthroughs that save countless human lives?

The answer lies in the fact that from the first death,
Kevorkian's killing has been cast as a ``right to die'' issue.
The Michigan legislature, the courts, the Michigan State Medical
Society, the Michigan Bar Association, Michigan State
University's Medical Ethical Resource Center (MERN), the Michigan
Civil Liberties Union, and the media legitimized Kevorkian's
death campaign as an issue of ``patient's rights.'' {No one,}
with the exception of the office of Oakland County Prosecutor
Richard Thompson, whose prosecution efforts were shot down
repeatedly by judges who favor assisted ``suicide,'' has
attempted to review the facts surrounding Kevorkian. It appears
that no one has investigated others involved in this death
conspiracy, like Margo Janis, Kevorkian's sister, who has
``assisted'' him in every death, and videotapes the victims
before they expire. Or Neal Nicol, Kevorkian's crony from the
days when Kevorkian was transfusing blood from corpses in
hospital basements. Now, Nicol supplies Kevorkian with the carbon
monoxide used to kill the victims, as well as his home for some
of the deaths.

When Kevorkian was told that legislators had passed a law to
temporarily make assisted suicide a felony, he reportedly
guffawed, ``Now, the stage is set for fun!'' His ``fun'' is
watching vulnerable women die. He also used to do paintings with
old blood.  Is this a doctor concerned with a patient's
``rights,'' or does Michigan have another Charles Manson on its
hands?

                - Is Kevorkian insane? -

The issue of whether Kevorkian is insane was first officially
raised by Dr. Ljubisa J. Dragovic, chief medical examiner of
Oakland County, Michigan, just after Kevorkian took the lives of
his seventh and eighth victims on Dec. 15, 1992. Dr. Dragovic has
ruled that the manner of death of all the victims he investigated
were {homicides}; that is, someone else, other than the victim,
was actively involved in causing the death. He told {EIR,} ``I am
very suspicious that a psychiatric disorder may be a motivating
factor in these deaths. It's a question of insanity. This is not
normal behavior. It's {high time} for responsible psychiatrists
in this state to step in and make an assessment of this bizarre
behavior, and offer it to the public.''

From the start, the problem with any investigation has been that
Kevorkian and his attorneys, Geoffrey Fieger and Michael
Schwartz, act in well-orchestrated obstruction of justice. On the
scene of the ``suicides,'' Kevorkian's attorneys instruct all
those present, whom he says he represents, not to cooperate with
the police, {to say nothing.} Reportedly the police are called
after the media are alerted that ``Kevorkian has done another
double.'' Fieger or Schwartz then holds a press conference
releasing ``facts'' on the latest victim.

Once the victim is dead, Kevorkian says he wants to ``exploit
this natural phenomenon [death] for human betterment''--for his
idea of betterment is that these women are better off dead. About
his first victim, Janet Adkins, who had Alzheimer's disease, he
expressed revulsion at the condition of people with that disease,
referring to them as ``things.'' His second victim, Majorie
Wantz, had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric
institution twice, took very large doses of a psychotropic
medication whose side effects have led some to attempt suicide
and murder. Three physicians sought to institutionalize Wantz
weeks before Kevorkian implemented her ``suicide.'' No sign of a
physical disease causing her chronic pain was evident at her
autopsy. Kevorkian asks who in their right mind would try to stop
``a cripple who can't even talk'' from wanting to kill himself?
Thus, the death of Sherry Miller, who Fieger says had
``malignant'' multiple sclerosis.  Miller, who did not ask for
help from the Michigan MS Society or any of the excellent
technology centers that assist anyone with any handicap, said she
was a burden to her family.

           - The truth behind one `suicide' -

With each death, the lies become more outrageous, the
intimidation of the authorities and any critics more glaring, and
the criminal investigations almost non-existent. All of this is
served up to the public, via the media, which take what Fieger
and Schwartz dish out.

On Nov. 23, 1992, Kevorkian struck down his sixth victim,
Catherine Andreyev, a 46-year-old woman from Coraopolis,
Pennsylvania. Andreyev allegedly called Kevorkian on Nov. 22.
Within 18 hours, she was found in Michigan, dead. Carbon monoxide
had been administered to her through a mask-like mechanism built
by Kevorkian and allegedly triggered by the victim.

The murder took place in the same Waterford Township ``death
house'' of Kevorkian supporter Neal Nicol, where Lois Hawes,
Kevorkian's previous victim, had been killed two months before.
Waterford police arrived to find Kevorkian attorney Michael
Schwartz looking for the press, along with Kevorkian and a member
of the Hemlock Society enjoying a coffee klatch with
quasi-relatives of the deceased.

The media circus began with Schwartz, who portrayed Catherine
Andreyev to a packed press conference as ``a victim of agony,
torture, and torment for six years.'' Schwartz said on national
news that night: ``Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 boys.... If one were
to inflict torture and agony on him, it would be considered cruel
and unusual punishment.... So, why do we allow this on ordinary
citizens, when we have the means to end it?''

The fact is that Catherine Andreyev fought her cancer in 1986,
and beat it until a lump was found and removed in 1989. Eight
weeks later, she was back at her two jobs, singing in several
church choirs, and traveling. She spent almost every holiday with
close friends.

After cancer was rediscovered in both lungs in December 1991, she
continued working both jobs. She only stopped in May 1992 so that
she could enjoy the summer. Up to the day before she died, her
house was full of long-time friends and visitors bearing videos
or Italian or Chinese dinners. She was ambulatory, slept plenty
without difficulty, and was not bedridden; she needed nurses to
visit for only a total of three hours weekly.

But Schwartz, who cares more about saving the ``wetlands'' than
human life, said Andreyev ``had no hope of a normal life ... her
every day was wracked by excruciating pain.... She could not even
sleep. She was unable to walk without assistance.... She
experienced a torture of the type most of us will never come to
know. Each day had been an additional day of horror and dread.
She was determined to end that horror and dread.'' The national
media made headlines of it all.

Andreyev did all that she did, needing only a mild pain
medication, until August. Only five months ago did she begin to
use Duragesic patches that dispensed about 50 micrograms of a
morphine derivative. The dosage could be increased to 300
micrograms, after which, Andreyev knew, a morphine drip was
available. At the time of her death, her medication level was 200
micrograms--nowhere near the limit. Friends knew when her
medication had to be adjusted, because she would show {temporary}
symptoms of irritability and depression.

She was due to have a nurse visit and adjust her medication on
Nov. 23, the day she was killed. The night before, however, she
reportedly called Kevorkian, whom she or a friend had contacted
months earlier. Kevorkian saw Andreyev's medical records and knew
her medication level. Unlike any other doctor--or any other human
being--Kevorkian did not urge Andreyev to call her doctor, her
nurses, or a friend. He did not advise her to get to a hospital,
or try to hold out for a few hours until her nurse arrived. He
did not help her in her momentary depression. No, Dr. Death had
Catherine Andreyev driven into Michigan and killed. The
quasi-relative and friend who drove her to her death benefitted
significantly from her estate.

{EIR} was told that there was no reason for Pennsylvania
authorities to investigate. Although assisting in a suicide is a
felony in Pennsylvania, and Andreyev was driven across state
lines to avoid prosecution, there would be no investigation, the
view being that the woman ``was going to die anyway--this was her
right.''

             - From toys to death machines -

Kevorkian's research, always on dead people, dates back decades
to his brief and erratic work episodes in hospitals like Beverly
Hills Medical Center, where he did his ``death rounds''--racing
in to examine and photograph the eyes of just-expired patients.
He claimed that he could pinpoint the time of death according to
the dilution of eye color. At Pontiac General Hospital in
Michigan, he conducted unauthorized experiments in which he
nearly killed a person after he transfused blood from a corpse
into the live subject. In a decade of unemployment, while
offering ``death counseling,'' he bought old toy parts to make
``Mercitrons'' or ``Thanatrons.'' By 1989, he was looking for his
first victim.

Since 1950, Kevorkian had urged death row prisoners to choose a
form of execution that allows them to donate their organs or have
medical experiments done on them during operations from which
they would never wake up. He tells those who are ill or who are
``going to be killed anyway'' that their lives hold no value, but
their deaths might. His promise of harvesting enough body parts
to save six or eight people always starts with killing the
patient. The more he kills, the more he can save! He proposed a
medical auction where organs go to the highest bidder. The poor
get what's left over.

Kevorkian says that his early experience of seeing a woman
ravaged with cancer convinced him that doctor-assisted
euthanasia/suicide is ethical. His mother died of cancer--as
Hitler's support for euthanasia has been dated back to his
nursing his own mother in a battle against breast cancer.
Kevorkian's perversion of ``mercy'' is such that he now wants to
facilitate the killing of anyone with ``{any} disease that
curtails life, {even for a day.}''

             - Accomplices in high places -

Legislators have used Kevorkian's murders to push bills to make
medically assisted suicide legal. The Michigan Civil Liberties
Union is attacking even a pitiful law that temporarily makes
assisted suicide a felony in Michigan, on the grounds that
assisted suicide is an issue of the constitutionally guaranteed
right to privacy, just as abortion is.

A major accomplice is Nazi ``ethicist'' Howard Brody, M.D. (see
accompanying article), head of the Medical Society's medical
ethics committee and its forum to ``study'' this issue. Brody
runs Michigan State University's Medical Humanities Program and
is chairman of the Medical Ethics Resource Network, where
rationing health care based on age and handicap, and the denial
of life-saving care are hot topics. Although the Medical Society
voted down any motion to support laws to stop assisted suicide,
its president, Thomas Payne, insisted to {EIR,} ``We're against
any euthanasia or assisted-suicide.'' Did Payne not know that his
ethicist Brody just endorsed assisted suicide in the {New England
Journal of Medicine}?

Medicide, Kevorkian's neologism that uses the first and last
syllables of ``medically assisted suicide,'' actually means,
translated from Latin, the slaying or killing of the practice of
healing, or of those who heal. Thus there are two questions here:
Is Kevorkian insane? And will the people and medical
professionals of Michigan and the nation stop his accomplices
from allowing that ``slaying'' of the medical profession's
capacity to heal?

Box attached to previous article

Doctor Death's scheme backed
by medical journal

The {American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry} devoted its entire
February 1992 issue to Jack Kevorkian's plan to facilitate
medically assisted ``suicide'' by doctors trained to kill.

In his article, ``Fail-Safe Model for Justifiable Medically
Assisted Suicide,'' Kevorkian claims that the mores of society
should determine society's laws. Kevorkian and his attorneys
attack anyone who objects to his activities as a ``Catholic'' or
part of a fanatic religious minority. Kevorkian says that
religion has no place in medicine; medicine must ``evolve'' with
society's ethics.  He attacks today's taboos against euthanasia
because such laws are dictated by religion, and ``cause
unspeakable pain and suffering and irreparable harm to society as
a whole.''

His solution is ``medicide.'' Doctors of death, known as
obitiatrists, will receive post-graduate training programs, with
their own journals to document ``theoretical and practical
research'' in killing.  Kevorkian spins out a hypothetical case
of a patient, Wanda Endittal, who has multiple sclerosis, and who
requests death from her doctor, Frieda Blaime. The obitiatrist,
Will B. Reddy, M.D., visits the patient, and then her husband
(Frank Lee Endittal), her mother (Flo N. Tiers), father (Justin
Tiers), sister (Sheila Byde), and daughter (Dawn Endittal), who
opposes her mother's wish for selfish reasons.  The obitiatric
psychiatrist, Dr. Lotte Goode, consults an associate, Dr. Sy
Keyes, about Wanda. If the patient manifests any degree of
ambivalence, the whole process is stopped. Once the reviews are
over, action obitiatrists, Shelby Dunne, M.D., and Dewey Ledder,
M.D., vote and arrange for the patient's choice of either lethal
injection or gas. The official observer to the killing is Polly
Tishen.  The plan was given cautious consideration by some
psychiatrists whose comments appear in the issue. But one
psychiatrist thought the specialty should better be called
``Assisted Suicide Specialist,'' or ASS, for short.

* Origin: The Lincoln Legacy  703-777-5987 1200-14400 HST DS
(1:109/909)